Presence
Presence Presence is a multi-faceted skill, representing attributes of leadership, reputation, and charisma. While Conviction represents your overall mental and psychological toughness, Presence is a measure of social toughness — whether or not you’ll flinch and lose face in front of others, and how your image stands up to scrutiny and/or attack. Characters with a high Presence carry themselves with a quiet confidence no matter the situation, and when they speak, others stop and listen. They include military officers, mob bosses, politicians, and lawyers. The Social Fortitude trapping also adds to your social stress. Charisma Presence is used passively whenever someone is trying to size you up socially. While the 'Rapport ' skill also covers your ability to reach out to others and make an impression, it is a deliberate, active skill in comparison to Presence. Much like the split between 'Investigation' and 'Alertness, Rapport and Presence represent the active and passive sides of making an impression, respectively. As a rule of thumb, the GM may ask you to roll Presence to gauge impressions when you are not actively focusing your efforts on making one. Further, when you use Rapport to make a deliberate impression, you can call in Presence to complement the skill.'' '' '' ''Command'' Use Presence to direct troops, workers, or any other group attempting a task. Any time you are in a position to give orders to a group of followers or functionaries, you may apply your Presence skill to help coordinate their efforts. This will allow you to make a Well-Coordinated or similar aspect available to whoever is rolling for the combined task, via a maneuver. You can also use the skill to get a largely undifferentiated mob of people to behave in a particular way, such as convincing a group of people to evacuate a building or to charge a line of police. If your action has a theatrical element to it, you can use Performance to modify the roll. '' '' ''Reputation'' Presence can represent the strength of your reputation, in that it insulates you from the social maneuvers and attacks of others. This is not the same as fame or notoriety; it’s more a measure of how well you’re able to use your reputation to help you achieve social goals. To this end, there may be reputation-specific circumstances where you will roll Presence to defend against social attacks and maneuvers. '' '' ''Social Fortitude'' When facing a direct attack like a smear campaign or simply the latest gossip on the streets, Presence is how well you comport yourself in an outward, social fashion. Combined with a strong showing in other social skills such as Rapport and 'Deceit, your Presence makes you particularly difficult to assail in a social scene. Used this way, Presence is a passive ability, representing your social “toughness” under such circumstances. A higher-than-default rating in Presence improves the ability to take social stress, giving you more than the default number of stress boxes (2) if you take this skill.''